On Tuesday, Nov. 1 at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, we’re holding an open conversation with two media executives who are building “digital first” futures for their print companies: John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media (and CEO of Journal Register and MediaNews) and Justin Smith, president of Atlantic Media.

After they tell us what they mean by digital first and how they’re executing their strategies, we will drill down to the specifics about the impact on content, revenue, costs, staffing, and the transition. They are making their strategies work; we’ll ask how.

Full disclosure: I’m on Journal Register’s advisory board. I’m there because I’m excited to see Paton rescue newspapers by transforming them. I’m also an admirer of Smith since he launched The Week magazine with innovative models.

I like a biased (i.e. personal) view of goings-on, so how about a small, new-style, as-it-happens editing team letting me join the proceedings from England here – as reader-in-my-own-time in the first instance – using a voice-to-text converter, including their own voiced-to-text commentary? A few days after, somebody could plug in a few circles of their own to a copycat system, and join the live-meeting-revolutionizing-plus-new-journalism business they’re helping to create, global of course. Just imagine all the apps to come (and get on with them)…

Watch this – never that – space and time on grouprelations.com and elsewhere, – including your brain – just like this one – desperately straddling those faster-and-faster-converging left-and-right-side attention-influencers.

COMPETITION 01: What is unusual, i.e. you have never seen or thought of it before, about how I’ve used these jolly old English words here?

COMPETITION 03: Come back! What if you the chairperson or you the speaker are reading this new journalism up here on the platform? And you don’t like what you’re reading? And we’ve shifted into the second-generation-instant-global-feedback version (beta of course)? WHAT DO YOU DO?